Alisha eyed her, quizzically, as Tasìa approached the van,

She asked the American spook:

"Would you happen to have a set of keys? Or know the relay?"

Alisha smiled thinly.

"I'm afraid not. The van is Rubin's baby. He rarely lets anyone else even ride in it."

"What about security measures? It's not going to grab me by the tits and rip them off is it?"

Alisha folded her arms and chuckled.

"That's oddly specific. Is that from personal experience?"

Tasìa gave a firm, deft nod.

"Yup. I tried to steal a hotrod when we, the Sisters in the Service of a Loving and Graceful God, were on a field trip to a stock car race in San Pedro."

Alisha grinned wide.

"Let me get this straight. You were a nun. You tried to steal a car that was being driven in an active race?"

Tasìa shrugged.

"I saw an opportunity. The pit crew was busy checking on everything else but the 1971 STP Plymouth. The reserve refill tanks, the spare tires, air gauges, all the things they routinely check

"That most bueno of a car just sat right there in front of me begging little momma to take it for a spin. Well, it may have looked like it was from 1971 and driven by Petty nearly a hundred years ago, but the mesh carapace hid a set of clinchers camouflaged inside the door frame.

"When I tried to jimmy the lock, they thrust out and grabbed me by the tits, and pulled me up against the door where I couldn't move. With my face smashed up against its side, I could barely breath either.

"Two pit crew guys laughed it up when they finally turned around and noticed me. Fortunately, they thought I was only there to admire the sexy machine. So, they helped me out of the jam up and let me return to the seats."

Alisha laughed out loud but stopped and looked around to make sure she didn't draw any attention. Coyotes of an urban disposition roamed near a line of parked waste services trucks across the street. They perked their ears up, curiously.

Alisha finally spoke.

"Well, you could poke the van with a stick."

She suggested as she pointed to a tangle of branches lying in a waste water ditch near by.

Tasìa shook her head.

"Odds are, your friend has a daemon inside that vehicle. Taunting it might piss it off. Something about it seems like it is just watching and waiting for me to pull some shit."

Alisha gave her a roll of the eyes that expressed: You're being paranoid.

The American spook gave the backdoor a swift kick with her left boot. Inside the cabin a shimmery grey light came to life. It quickly dimmed to nothing.

"Shit," Tasìa whispered. "Only things designed to hurt you emmit grey light."

Alisha snorted.

"Like ghosts, you mean?"

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Tasìa squinched her eyes back at Alisha in a hard gaze.

"Seriously? Macro controls for wards and guardian entities tend to give off a grey shimmer when active or in some form of interaction. I'm surprised Demona is not telling you the same."

Alisha frowned.

"She is on standby. Though Demona doesn't technically sleep, her maintenance cycles keep her big-ass brain from atrophying."

Tasìa nodded as she considered the emotional state of her partner-of-convenience. She gave Alisha's attire a once over. At the moment, the spy looked like she emmerged from the den of a punk rock club.

Stylish Veronicas, silver jeans, and a lacy black dress with dozens of metal studs flowing down the length of it to mid thigh.

When they first met, Alisha came across as the quintessential American hippie girl. She was anything but that now.

A true spy-craft changeling.

Tasìa did a quick psyche-eval to determine if their team-up was going to work. Alisha had her reasons to be tense and shoot from the hip at that moment.

Tasìa could appreciate having one's life turned upside down, and what that tended to do for one's emotional state of being.

She would just roll with whatever sarcasm that came her way for the time being.

"Well?" Alisha looked at her and back at the van. "Those breach skills, it would be kind of neat to see them in action."

She regarded the American's words appreciatively.

I would call that, 'politely testy.'

Tasìa answered with two raised fingers to urge patience, and a spritely, "sure."

She just needed to check on one factor.

Tasìa pulled out Val's PA, set its interface to text console mode, and pinged the van.

That it possessed a Personal Daemon was confirmed. It's neural net served a double purpose - an AI transmote, and a sensor graph that spread like a dot matrix across the entirety of the van.

The former function was of little use to her unless she planned to hack a takeover for the entire system. That she did not need to do to merely burglarize it.

The later aspect of its net when she ran a diagnosis confirmed that her plan was doable. She studied the sensor set-up for the three entrance doors.

So long as she did not turn any of the locking mechanisms, the daemon would not react, but once she did, the reaction was going to result in sheer overkill.

Rubin had its defenses dialed up way higher than what was needed for a van. It made her wonder what he kept inside it that caused him to over-compensate.

Ironically, perhaps, the extreme attenuation of the van's defense mechanisms was its weakness.

Tasìa reached into her fanny-pack and dug out the few remaining .22 moon-clips. There was one specialty type she never got around to using that she intended to use to neutralize the surveillance cameras.

Informally, they were called sparkies.

A sparky cartridge held a bullet that absorbed both electrical and kinetic energy before it pulsated a mass of built up energy back out.

Its effects were not entirely predictable but were guaranteed to be ugly for whatever they were used against.

Tasìa freed two sparkies out of a moon-clip. She also removed a bobby-pin from the hair behind her right ear.

She aligned the two rounds inside the turnkey rotor locking mechanism and held them in place with her knuckles. With the other hand she pulled the bobby-pin inside out so that it now had to be held between her fingers to keep the pin from snapping back in place.

Tasìa slipped the pin between the two bullets until all three objects were snuggly fit and immovable. Before she was finished, Tasìa carefully bent the bulbous bobby-pin tips snug against the rim of their respective cartridge cases where they touched the center-fired primers.

Tasìa stepped back several yards and urged Alisha to join her.

"You might want to do the same."

Alisha raised her chin in challenge.

"I think I can make that shot," she stated with more than a little braggadocio.

Tasìa nodded. She checked the Magellani .22 revolver. Eleven standard rounds remained in the cylinder.

"Alright, sister. I'd prefer you to use my gun. You got one sweet and sexy hunk of metal there that you are holding, but the dainty pew-pew this one gives off wont even attract the coyote's attention."

Alisha took the gun from Tasìa.

"When I was a little girl back in Arizona, I use to shoot prairie dogs from the back of a four wheeler quad to collect bounties during the Summer of the Lycanthropy Scare. This will be child's play."

Alisha lined up her shot, and drilled the bullet into the curve of the bobby-pin perfectly. The two .22 rounds spun into the locking mechanism' chambered rotor as they slammed forward.

With a snapping sound, sparks flew about. A grey light pulsed to life and oscillated from one end of the van in rapid succession to the other. It knocked against the bullet-proofed windows violently until they all shattered.

The daemon grew spectral, and she saw within it a ghastly face that quickly dissipated.

"Oh, shit," Alisha exclaimed, "did you see that!"

"I'm afraid I did."

A slight orange glow shimmered into life inside the van. Tasìa checked with Val's PA. She still had a readout of the van's vitals. The circuitry was rebuilding.

"We ought to hurry," Tasìa urged. "The daemon will be back before too long."

"Well, after you," Alisha motioned.

Tasìa chuckled.

"Now, who is afraid of ghosts?"